Elever med utländsk bakgrund berättar : möjligheter att lära matematik

Sammanfattning: The purpose of the study is to examine how immigrant students, who live and attend school in multicultural and socially deprived areas, are experiencing their possibilities to learn mathematics. The thesis discusses how public discourses affect students’ foregrounds and rationales for learning in different ways, contributing to how the students perceive their possibilities to learn mathematics. The empirical material consists of focus group interviews with students in grade 9. The results show that immigrant students’ shortcomings in mathematics are affected by wide variety of influences, most of which are out of their control to change. The study suggests that it is of importance to consider the influence of public discourse on students’ possibilities to learn mathematics. Students live within these discourses and have accepted them as "the truth about the world". One implication from the findings is that access to an equivalent mathematics education for students in Swedish Compulsory School needs to be problematized and include factors outside of the classroom situation itself.